Tuesday, October 13, 2015

The Washington County Studio Tour overlaps the Portland one on October 17-18 and I'm in both tour guides, along with two other Cedar Mill artists, Annie Salness and Gretha Lindwood. We're hoping for a good turnout in spite of predicted rain.

I'm the featured artist in the Washington County Art Alliance blog today. Read about me here.

For years in mid-October some friends and I have piled into our car and gone around town visiting as many art studios as we can cram into a day. It's a fun way to have a party, seeing lots of different art and poking into magical places where we don't ordinarily have access. Talking to artists about their process is always revealing and interesting.

Won't you invite a friend or two to tour with you next Saturday or Sunday? I'd love to see you.

Thursday, October 08, 2015

It's down to the wire for me... the Portland Open Studios Tour begins in two short days and I'm close enough to ready that if someone came to my door this afternoon I'd welcome them with open arms. Of course, I'll welcome ALL visitors who stop by Saturday or Sunday, this weekend or next.The walls of my studio, living room and dining room are covered with artwork and I'm ready to do some interesting demonstrations of some of the processes I use in creating my collages. I'll show a couple of ways I paint papers, work on several collages, talk about the rabbit trails I followed to get to this point in my artistic life, and be ready to shoot the breeze about whatever questions you might have. Do stop by between 10 and 5 any of the 4 days that my home and studio will be open. There's lots of art to admire and buy and I have some nice blank cards available, too.This year's tour guides make it easy to navigate your way from one studio to the next, and in Cedar Mill where I live there are 6 artists whose interesting art is on view.

The printed tour guide is a spiral bound book featuring all the artists whose studios are open this year, grouped by community. I'm in Community 4, page 33. The only ways you will know how to find the studios is to buy a guide book or the phone app (see links below). The guide book is available at New Seasons, The Muse Art and Design, I've Been Framed, Collage, or Tickets West. I have a couple of copies I can sell early birds. They're $15 and serve as admission to all the studios.

Phone apps are available for IOS and Android.

The $4.99 iPhone app is available here. The free iPhone app is available here: The $4.99 Android app is available here:The free Android app is available here:

The phone apps have red pin drops showing the location of the studios; the blue pins are local eateries who paid for the pin drop. See you on the weekend. Jo Reimer

Art Tip: Removing acrylic from hands

Use ordinary hand sanitizer to quickly remove acrylic paint and medium from your hands. The alcohol in the sanitizer dissolves the acrylic. Wipe well with a paper towel and then wash with soap and water.

Art Tip: brush cleaning

As I work with acrylic medium for glue or with acrylic paints I stand my brushes in a bucket of water on my work table and give them a soap and water cleanup every day or so. But eventually my brushes get gunky and sometimes I forget to clean them. That's when I clean them with Murphy's Oil Soap. I keep an inch of MOS mixed 1:1 with water in a tall plastic tub (Feta from Costco) and put caked brushes in that solution overnight. By the next day the soap has softened the brush and with a bit of elbow grease I can get the brushes back to useable. This also works for brushes used with oil paint. I gave up using oils but wanted to save those good brushes and Murphy's Oil Soap came to the rescue. Get it at the grocery store.